unleashing the greater potential of organizations

General Thoughts & Guidance

11/25/2008

make changes in something
established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products …American Heritage Dictionary

innovate

verb

a potential within all living organisms for responding to environmental or intrinsic conditions, including change, often executed by exploratory expression or experimentation for (ultimately) achieving beneficial new individual or collective circumstances.…a
personal observation

As a logical extension of the observation above, I believe
innovation is a vital capability residing within every human, granted by nature.Conversely, I
believe most conventional organizations oppose and defend themselves against
innovation purposely, to varying degrees, through the operating designs they have in place. One does not have to be an expert to quickly assess a wide variety of ways that organizations firmly hold in place effective methods for
ignoring, suppressing or extinguishing people's innovation and valuable comments. Interestingly, organizations often accomplish this risk-laden condition in an invisible, oblivious and entirely blameless manner. It is ironic that while preventing innovation, many organizations simultaneously invest significant sums to gain or add "an innovative edge" within their operations. Other organizations simply suffer while wasting time and money, and sometimes totally fail, because they refuse to allow innovation to percolate from their midst.

Everyday I witness the phenomena of energized people attempting to offer better processes or technologies, new cost-saving methods and creative ways to solve old problems to organizations. It never ceases to amaze me at the extreme difficulty they face when trying to do so. Sadly, many simply give up from exhaustion and despair. And these frustrated folks may be found working within any role throughout the organization: CEO, housekeeping, doctor, pilot, engineer, production line, nurse, teacher, CFO, supervisor, driver, COO, programmer, salesperson, etc.

I suppose this reality is the reason for a mantra that's universally repeated in organizations: "Its better to seek forgiveness than to seek permission."

Innovation is not, in a general sense, needing to be “introduced to,”
“added to” or “developed in" people within or outside the organization, at least at the most fundamental levels.Rather, innovation may be first and best advanced in
organizations by placing attention to ceasing, taking away or reducing everything that’s visibly resisting, subversively disabling and successfully inhibiting people’s ideas, experiments, imagination, sounding of alarms, suggestions, inspiration, opposing viewpoints and conclusions, creative discussions and vocalized alternatives to the status quo.

If you are a leader, supervisor or board member, I believe valuable innovation already is all around you, though perhaps remaining largely dormant or suppressed by your present organizational design, practices and behaviors. I am confident your workplace and marketplace is a fertile landscape. This landscape's rich soil is waiting to be seeded, cultivated and harvested by you at this very
moment. There is no barren ground. The power of far better products and profits or reduced expenses, risks and liabilities for your organization is ever present, though presently languishing latent within workers', suppliers' or customers' minds. Unlimited creativity and astute, vital comments are simply waiting to be unleashed, revealed, refined and realized from
the many powerful brains in your workplace and marketplace. There may be no greater waste and neglect in most organizations than failing to mine the golden ore of its untapped, massive brainpower; and ironically, few riches are so easy and inexpensive to reach, extract and translate to benefit.

Consider: everything
living in nature, plant or animal, finds itself, at times, suboptimal in
relation to changes in purpose or conditions within its environment.All living things respond, experiment,
mutate, create, evolve and adapt. Innovation is so often positioned as illusive, mysterious and confounding in business magazines, countless books and seminars, but it happens to be a primary quality found throughout nature for the
pursuit of the optimal or the response to change.Humans, in ways strikingly similar to wily bacteria and viruses, or a seemingly static douglas fir, are encoded and enabled to be constantly innovating, and to be doing so in
a fine manner.That is, until these humans become dominated or restrained by organizational or social structures that
repel a new idea, kill an opposing viewpoint, dismiss a comment, punish a failed experiment, ignore a contradicting observation, roadblock creativity, "table" a report of conflicting evidence, are deaf to expressions of reasonable concerns or even to the loud ringing of alarms.

We shouldn't forget:organizations
are not innovative; rather, people are!

By this I mean the fountainhead of any
innovative result to be found in any organization flows from the human mind. Organizations can only harvest, leverage and
propel human innovation, if they so desire.Unfortunately, even in 2008, few so desire.Most organizations have been developed
and maintained to be narrowly focused, such as to a charter or mission.They apply severe attention to structure,
controls, influences, policies, procedures, management, leadership and constant
attention to the reduction or elimination of variables.Yes, this is one reason why “change
management gurus” are in many cases financially secure (…and yes, why change
initiatives so often fail in fighting the forces at play).Indeed, the very word “organize” implicitly
conveys a controlled social structure, or division of labor arrangement, for a
distinct purpose.Organization,
order and structure in this instance can be practically synonyms.

It follows that most organizations may be configured for battling against "supposed entropy," or against any form of "assumed degradation" by that which brings about disorder, chaos, contradiction, collapse, or even worse, the new. This may be why so many organizations can become fixed, hardened and hobbled by rigid conventions, "holy momentum," "policy cement" and the stasis of legacy. On the other hand,
innovation in any form within an organization can be seen by some as, or in
part, “a threatening emergence of disorder.” For indeed, by innovation’s nature it challenges the
established, the conventional, the momentum, the policies, the legacy and the status quo.

Ah, there’s the rub!

This is not to
diminish the value of present day organizations, nor the many important constructive and
productive mechanisms within them.Rather this content proposes an evolution (metamorphosis?) of the today's typical organizational architecture, beginning with the widespread acknowledgement, acceptance and thoughtful response to this reality:

...people
and organizations are (very) different!

This "difference" is directly relevant to bettering organizational innovation, since it can be anticipated that
while it is in people’s innate nature to innovate. Conversely, most
organizations prevailing today have an architecture in place to prevent their
wealth-building and very survival from people’s innovation.

The design of the affiliation between organizations and people should now evolve into a new form of "relationship." Such a new form of relations would enable the organizational sum to be greater than the parts, as opposed to today's parts often being far greater that the sum (suboptimal organizational outcomes).

Here’s an analogy
that may help—Immune systems are a defensive means our bodies apply to identify and protect us from things that “seem alien” and threaten our well-being.Such immune systems may be either
properly “programmed” or improperly programmed.When the latter is the case, harmless, or even beneficial and
important things that we need can trigger negative, violent immune system
responses (such as some people’s allergic reactions to peanuts or woodland
sumac).In fact, often it is our
own mal-programmed immune system that can create life-threatening health
problems, such as Type 1 Diabetes or transplanted organ tissue rejection.

Using this analogy,
here is my premise—most organizations today have “malformed immune mechanisms”
in place when it comes to innovation.Innovation, whether in the form of worker comments, viewpoints,
concerns, modest cost-saving suggestions or radical ideas. The rejected source can equally beyond the organization's walls such as a customer, a supplier, a salesperson standing in the lobby or
just a concerned third party. Even paradigm-shifting
ideas are too often identified as “the enemy,” nuisances and distractions, or at best, annoyances of little relevance, value
and priority.Such organizational
immune mechanisms are operating each day in a wide variety of passive and
active, subtle and overt ways.Some
are incredibly simple and others are amazingly complex and systemic.I argue that the immune systems of the
typical organization is presently “out of touch” or “out of balance” with the
realities that surround the organization, thus it often is rejecting what it
needs the most…innovation.

Perhapsthe
industrial revolution ushered in this “imbalance” and thus the present state of organizational programming and rules may have been more correct for “another time” in history. For example, during the industrial period organizations perfected
the “labor model” as a construct to form dominant
affiliation witha person.This was a “We think. You do!” theory to consistently achieve minimum, yet uniform, human performance within
standardized functions that were collectively assigned to a person (aka a “job”). People were "plugged into" the production process for more the need of their body and muscle than from any contributions from their mind. Charles Taylor's work in management science in the early 1900's finished nailing this construct firmly into the workplace.

This "industrial period model," though
severely outdated, prevails until this day across many workplaces, even though the workplace and related marketplace challenges, opportunities and risks have fundamentally changed. Now we sorely need every mind in our workplace, supply chains and marketplaces solving our problems, but this need arrives with many implications.

Organizations' (analogous) immune systems, do serve real and valuable
purposes, for many dangers exist which merit strong and constant defenses.Nevertheless, I argue
and support the need for remodeling, redesigning and reprogramming the typical
organization’s immune system in order for the organization to have a far better
appetite and digestion for the nourishing and beneficial ideas, comments and concerns of its entire
workforce, its suppliers and its customers.

The name we use for an organization that welcomes, nurtures and sustains constructive worker, supplier and customer expression isaCreative
Hive™. Such an organization may be remarkably similar to "superorganisms" that thrive in nature. By achieving this state, they tend enjoy extraordinarily positive prospects. As the name of this blog implies, bee hives are an example of a superorganism. The "distributed information management architecture" of a bee hive offers inspiration for achieving collective benefit through optimized individual expression.

A bee hive's elegant design dependably directs and supplies the requirements of their community with precision. This "interactive and inclusive architecture" attends to and regulates all life span needs, responds quickly to a wide range of environmental changes, reaches reliable decisions, directs procreation, applies specialized, succession-based work roles and even expands via "new ventures" (the swarm). By applying a tested "superorganism" blueprint developed across the ages that is based upon individual expression, bees dramatically raise the probability of both individual and community success.

Across time the authors of this blog will be sharing thoughts herein about imagining, enabling and supporting Creative Hives. We invite your comments, ideas, observations, anecdotes and expressive critical thoughts as we blaze new trails together.

11/27/2008

What is perhaps significant or different about an organization designed to be a Creative Hive? Certainly such an environment is a fertile petri dish for creative expression, multi-vantage observation and unrelenting problem-solving. Two of the primary nutrients are:

Since Creative Hive percolates abundant thoughts from all possible sources, it also inherently understands that all ideas, expressions and concerns do not merit action. Thus it has a design to enjoy a high degree of stochastic resonance. That is, the Creative Hive has ways and means to effectively and efficiently "separate the signal from the noise." Or you might say, "separate the valued wheat from the less useful chaff" from its percolating supply of creative expression (as does a bee hive).

There are many components in a Creative Hive which are unified into a productive synthesis. Some are idiosyncratic for the organization's unique circumstances, while other elements appear to be rather universal. Below are what I now believe to be a few of the key defining universal components of a sustainable Creative Hive:

1. Leadership offering appropriate attention to innovation; expecting innovation from throughout the workforce, at all levels and in all quarters; and is an active sponsor of innovative culture. It is rare that sustainable innovation will be ultimately any greater than leadership's vision, operating philosophy and their related establishment of applicable accountabilities, processes and systems that are congruous with enabling optimal innovation. Accepting innovation for many organizations is often unnatural, running counter to short-term forces and the momentum acting upon the organization. Leadership must acknowledge and offer compelling advocacy for widely distributed worker, supplier, customer and user expression and ensure responsiveness to those expressions.

Such leaders appreciate that innovation by its nature is usually bottom-up, organic and emergent in nature, as it arises within the mind of every person. Therefore, they architect an environment optimal for respecting, outfitting, tapping and leveraging each of those minds, without waste or neglect. These leaders place their organization on a relentless pursuit of improvement, learning and leverage of growing knowledge. They will seldom be found to be complacent within any related domain of their organization's core competencies. They possess intellectual curiosity and mental stamina to always propel them in seeking advantages to survival, as well as realizing financial and marketplace victories. They foster authentic expression and communications throughout their organizational, supplier and customer communities (which can be quite difficult to achieve in many situations, particular in the presence of authority or contextual conflicts).

2.A “talent model” displaces the "labor model” in that people are sought for maximum or optimal performance, as opposed to accepted or institutionalized minimum performance. (How else can innovation be harvested unless we seek greater yields from our talent investments, such as by moving away from minimum thresholds of job-based forms of work performance expectations?)

3.To realize peak performance, the organization attends to optimally forming, sustaining and stewarding relationships with each qualified worker, and does so by design. Up-to-date, substantive information exchange offers "relationship guidance" to all parties.In such a relationship, based on reciprocal performance, everyone is accountable for “thinking, speaking and doing.”Work roles are collaborative, based upon a design of reciprocal performance.Work is a we thing!

4.Innovation is a functional requirement within every work role's design. This design is inclusive of continuous improvement and knowledge management, is well-articulated, and based upon explicit agreement between the parties. There is shared acknowledgement that the performance of this (and any function) can only be accomplished byboth parties' contributing and being accountable for personal functional performance in these areas.

Both personal and organizational performance related to applicable innovation functions aremeasured, often by key indicators. Results are further assured by strict compliance measures, as in any other function. Accordingly, within a Creative Hive, innovation is not an optional, sporadic, random, hoped for "peripheral" gain; but rather, personal work role innovation is seen as an essential cause or factor for attaining each work role's targeted yields.

This is best accomplished by work role design through the application ofaccurate, complete theory, organizing principles and methods (with distributed competencies and a common language for same) for seeking, forming and sustaining such work role relationships. Such work role design addresses the needs and requirements of both parties (displacing limited job descriptions, “one size fits all” HR models, “toss ‘em over the fence" recruiting programs or dictatorial, suffocating management practices.Leadership factors tend to rise in relative importance against management factors. Continuous improvement and related knowledge management are beneficial.

5. Accordingly, wherever work role innovation is seen as a work role function, the organization's responsibilities for innovation areaccomplished by diligent attention (as opposed to intention). Attention is directed to these vital areas:

a. Permitting a fertile, nurturing environmental “ambience” for functional innovation to flourish from every person. This includes vigilance to discover, remedy or purge any toxic attitudes, practices, policies and behaviors that may be harmful to innovation. Creative Hives welcome innovation of any type or context from any person and all situations. Creative Hives are sensitized and alert, for they know that all too often some of the ultimately most valuable innovative expressions are found in the "fringes," or may be only whispered once by the "meek."

b.Properly seeding and specifically offering to all targeted minds "precipitating information" so as to provoke creativity in a manner resonating with the organization's desirable tactical and strategic objectives, problems, opportunities or threats. Well-crafted information sparks useful imagination!

c.Putting in place mechanisms to ensure the incoming content of submitted ideas, comments, concerns and alarms are constructed so as to be optimally vetted, understood and considered by the organization. Submissions must be guided so as to accurately resonate with the organizational parameters of need.

d. Localizing and distributing the submission, review and decision processes in an optimal manner for the organization's situations and circumstances. Preferably, front line or contextual talent stewards will be assigned much or all of this responsibility within their roles (through the practice of Relationship Performance™ or Work role Yields Management™ WRYM).

e.Having in place a submissions stratification, vetting, review, collaboration, comment, administration/rights management, knowledge management/archival system. Within Creative Hives such a system is known as innovation content management™ (ICM). Effective processes combined with ICM mechanisms should advance the efficacy of submission review, feedback, collaboration and acceptance. Note: TalentSphere's Innovation Harvester™ is an ICM example.

f. Diversity of thought, experiences and interests within a gender-, age- and culturally-balanced community are not only respected, but purposely sought and celebrated, even when inherently frustrating (due to inherent contention, debate, decision-making and management challenges).

g.Key indicatormetrics and compliance means for each of the above are in place, monitored and attended with timely action.

h. Before making decisions or taking actions, contextual understanding is sought with ample humility. A quest for root causes and/or evidence trumps any comfort to be found in assumptions, prejudices or dogma. Few things are better for attaining stochastic resonance, regulating attention and establishing innovation submission vetting priorities than seeking a reliable understanding of the underlying realities, forces and influences that are acting on the organization.

11/30/2008

Is the concept of a Creative
Hiveentirely new? Answer: of course not! This is because there have always been organizations and communities where many of the universal components of the Creative Tribe exist. Indeed, across centuries these communities have provided human civilization many creative dimensions of betterment for its survival and success (and in a variety of situations across time, their absence has lead to demise, disease and despair).

Accordingly, many organizations exhibiting and even radiating Creative Hive traits continue to exist within our geographic and industry communities
today.Sometimes you can find surprising departmental or "cloistered group" examples within organizations that you'd least expect, but they are often well-hidden and sometimes necessarily protected from the common view (..maybe even in your own organization or ecosystem?).

Who might they be and where might we find them?If you do not know where to begin your search, please read again the Characteristics of a Creative Hive.Then consider: “who must have many or all of these
components in place to exist or thrive as a community?”As you do so, many examples may readily
come to your mind:

•
Thriving advertising agencies, especially those who are the most highly respected for ground-breaking deliverables.

•“Skunk Work” settings, such as
those that create aviation or military apparatus.

•Bellwether software and game development teams.

• In some cases, those activities found in true entrepreneurial efforts, including the players in some new venture capitalist portfolios.

• Theme park venue or toy designers.

• Within groups assigned to discovery, experimentation or construction aimed to new territories having hostile conditions, such as those in outer space, of sustainable deep sea oil exploration, creating better polar living experiences or those breaking new ground in validating theoretical physics.

Of course this list can go on.Are any of these perfect benchmarks or baselines for your
Creative Hive?Perhaps not. Can those listed benefit in their own thinking by adopting Creative Hive principles to their situation? I believe so.

Nevertheless, each entity listed above and your own thoughtful additions may reveal strong clues to guide your thinking in areas such as organizational design, processes,
behaviors, leadership traits, systems, communications and other enabling mechanisms to directly aid you and advance your own Creative Hive architecture.

How do you begin to accurately assess those special traits
they all have in order to thrive?

Once more, read again "Characteristics of a Creative Hive" to direct your attention.

Answering two vital questions related to a comparison between your organization and those on the above list may be even more important to your
investigation and learning:

1. What factors do these communities have in place that my organization tends to resist, or has not considered having, installing and sustaining?

2. What factors do these communities NOThavein place, or what do they strive to prevent, that my organization tends to accept, perpetuate and promote, or we have not reduced or eliminated all together?

Note: the last question is of equal, or much greater, importance to the first question!

12/11/2008

Every person within an organizational ecosystem possesses potentially valuable intelligence, creativity, insights and problem-solving abilities. However, many organizations are designed only to hear and apply the thoughts and expressions of a limited group of elite "esteemed influencers."

There can be enormous benefit and critical importance for an organization to embrace an improved operating architecture with wide, open gateways for expression combined with improved efficacies in "signal" discernment and "noise" filtering. Advocated herein is a design enabling an organization to pursue and consider the the "full spectrum" of intelligence, experiences, knowledge, observations and creativity, insights and concerns of every worker, customer, supplier, candidate, investor, other applicable minds across and beyond its ecosystem. A Creative Hive is an organizational construct of "inclusive and open intelligence" as opposed to "exclusive, limited intelligence."

For an organization to accomplish such a reality, there are at least five primary considerations:

1. Reducing or eliminating factors that suppress or restrict expression or imagination throughout an organization's ecosystem. The suppression factors are generally present throughout an organization and be both blatant and hidden. Certainly, all empowered leadership must shift from being obstacles to becoming active proponents and participants in forming and sustaining a Creative Hive.

2. Emergent expression and stochastic resonance must be systemically enabled throughout the organization's ecosystem. This organic activity is balanced by distributed and central mechanisms of vetting and decision-making so as to accurately resonate with prospective tactical and strategic value.

3. Precipitatingattention and creative expressionof selectgroupstospecific topics, challenges and problems by design, so as toresonate accurately with the articulated needs and priorities of the organization.

4. Amplify and sustain fruitful worker innovation by explicit functional performance requirementswithin all its work role relationships. These are dependably realized by agreement with each worker and being responsible to each worker to equip, steward and facilitate their creative expression.

5. A foundation of continuous improvement and knowledge management incorporating measurements, analytics and compliance as optimal for meeting objectives and responding to challenges.

An ancient guiding model thrives in nature from which we can learn: the bee hive.

A bee hive enjoys benefits of extraordinary shared expression by its members. Instead of this leading to anarchy or wasteful, distracting noise, through a variety of known and mysterious mechanisms it achieves emergent, distributed decision-making in a very dependable manner. The bee hive accomplishes amazing efficacies in information exchange within local work role functions (such as for gaining optimal foraging yields throughout each day by applying localized waggle dance forums).

Equally, the bee hive has powerful design and mechanisms in place to create and address disruptive change for strategic aspects of expansion and survival (such as the need to pursue entirely new domains in a "swarm"). The bee hive offers to us a blueprint of a formidable social architecture that has been proven to be not only perpetually viable; but more importantly, to produce a superorganism having a responsive collective intelligence far beyond the sum of its citizens. This ensures the bee hive's long term continuity and daily productivity. It is also noteworthy that bee hive achieves its impressive results without dependence upon a flow of orders from a "C-Suite."

Is is possible for an organization populated with humans to leverage the bee hive's social architecture to realize greater strength, balance and responsiveness to its markets and environments? We believe it is. We call such a pursuit, design and practice the Creative Hive.

In conclusion, there are also examples of thriving "top down/bottom up" models that are somewhat analogous within human society:

• Modestly-regulated, free enterprise economic systems

• Democratic-republic political systems, such as that of the U.S.

There are also a few organizations and thought leaders beginning to pursue core competencies, operating behaviors and creative conditions that are very similar to those proposed by theCreative Hive:

• An exemplar may be Whirlpool Corporation's "Everyone, Everywhere" transformations that have recently been accomplished throughout its organizational ecosystem. In many ways, Google may also proving to be a noteworthy exemplar.